Broadcasting from EvE

Look! Do You Hear That?

I’m all about immersion, and for the most part EVE does a great job at putting you into your ship and making you feel like you really are in New Eden. Only the sound is lacking. Generally I’m not very sensitive to the quality or quantity of sound in games but I do wish there was more in EVE.

I’ve put together a casual list of suggested sound improvements I’ve been thinking about. I know there are improvements planned for Dominion so here’s to hoping some of the changes are on my list.

Combat

Shield/armor/structure warnings “Shield strength is now below 50% and dropping”

Any sort of EW. “The targeting computer is being jammed by enemy frigate.”

General

Proximity alerts. Would be especially useful while scanning. This could be turned on and off and set to a spherical range from your ship. “Unknown/Hostile/friendly cruiser is within 15,000km”

Anytime there is a flashing red in your overview. “Warning! Hostile craft in vicinity!

Activating the directional scanner

Communication

When someone private convos you. “Communication request incoming”

New Mail. “Message received”

Various beeps and blips that can be assigned to different chat channels so you know when there are new messages.

New transaction/wallet journal notification sound.

Someone on your buddy list signs on or off.

Navigation

When you arrive at a system where you have set a waypoint. “Waypoint Aunennen reached.”

When you arrive at a destination. “Destination Nonni reached.”

Ambient

In general I’d like to hear the ships being a little more “alive”, very subtle ambient sounds.

This is all off the top of my head. Would love to see more ideas in the comments.

CCP have never been great at immersion and they leave a lot to be disired when it comes to sound design. Sound is the most under-rated elements in games and yet is the most subtle and powerful emotional tool used in modern media.

With more audio input EvE Online would become incredibly immersive, the visuals are great but the sound could do better…

what about the cost of performance? i.e if I get 25 emails processing that sound 25 times seems wasteful. Yes a target is locking you might be nice, but I’ve been in battles with 150 ppl when 50 of them target me.. I’d rather not hear your being targeted 50 times…

I like your ideas but there needs to be some definitive logic behind this.

Absolutely. In an ideal world you’d have the option to turn any of these on and off. Or have dynamic conditions defining for example, Only tell me the first time I’m targeted, or don’t notify me of new mail while in combat, etc. There would certainly need to be some balance. I just want my spaceship in the far far future to communicate with me a little bit more.